It's a common mistake: calling them all bees. It's fine, quite many have done it but hopefully most will learn.

Bees are hairy and produce honey, wasps are less hairy and won't produce honey, Bumblebee is a transformer. Now we are ready to start!

Photo taken with Huawei Honor 7 Lite, flower is Phacelia tanacetifolia.

Bumblebees

Bumblebee, known also as the bombus, is a part of apidae-family and a part of one family of bees. There are over 200 species of bumblebees known. Depending on the species, most will live in colonies varying typically from 50 to 400 bumblebees. Smaller or larger colonies may occur. The nest is not like the well known honeybee or hornets nest, but it can be burrowed underground. Bumblebees don't produce honey in similar amounts as the honeybees do, even though bumblebees mostly feed on nectar and pollen

Photo taken with Huawei Honor 7 Lite, flower is Phacelia tanacetifolia.

Bumblebees can be generalized to be hairy and "fat" looking, they are typically colored in yellow, black and/or brown. The color and size varies by the species. Bumblebees flying seems clumsy and slow. The flying of bumblebee has been studied - already to see how they actually are able to fly!

_{Here you can find one study about bumblebee flight in heavy turbulence. You can't see the full study though without subscription.}

Bumblebees are not aggressive and aren't eager to sting a human. However, even a bumblebee sting can hurt and cause an allergic reaction. Avoid harming bumblebee nests if you find any and avoid harming the bumblebees, as they are important pollinators alongside with bees and butterflies.

Pollination is important for a great amount of plants, as their reproduction is focused in getting pollinated. The bumblebees are carrying the pollen from one flower to another, fertilizing the plant. The nature is a beautiful thing and watching insects work can be like watching plant erotica.

Both photos taken with Huawei Honor 7 Lite, flower is Phacelia tanacetifolia.

Bzzt bzzt. Not only a transformer, as you can see.

Bees

The most commonly known bees are the honeybees. Honeybees are known to produce grand amounts of money honey in their grand nests, in which they create magnificent constructs out of beeswax.

However, very few know that majority of bee species are not living in such big colonies. There are plenty of bees which are called hermit bees, as they aren't building large social nests but living alone or in groups of a few bees.

There are over 20.000 known species of bees in seven different families of bees. One of these families is Apidae, which contains over 5.000 different bee species. Apidae family has subfamily Apinae, in which you can find tribes like Bombini (the only living genus is Bombus, the bumblebees) and Apini (which contains genus Apis, the honeybee) which are commonly known.

Photo taken with Huawei Honor 7 Lite, I didn't get as good photo of the bee as I had hoped to get, but bees are rare in Finland and I was lucky to get this photo.

Bees are typically smaller than the bumblebees. They can be generalized to hairy but slimmer than bumblebees. They are typically yellow/brown/black, just like the bumblebees, once again the color and size varies depending on the species of bees.

One specific type of honeybees is the "killer bee", known more commonly as africanized honey bee. They are far more aggressive than most common bees (which are not very aggressive) and are known even to kill horses. The killer bees are originally created by work of men, as they are a mix of European and South African bees in an attempt to create better bees to create more honey. Some of these new kind of bees escaped and spread in the wild.

Bzzzzzt, the bee was too fast and flew away. You can still find it in the picture!

Most bees are not very aggressive and they are very important pollinators and are typically commercially used to create both honey and to pollinate plants in farms. Bee hives can be placed in the proximity of strawberry fields to increase the yield compared to only using native pollinators.

Wasps (hornets and other bug-devils

Wasps are devils on wings. Pure hate born in flesh, even though they are not specially fleshy. Wasps are relatives to bees as much as they are relatives of ants (they all are a part of Apocrita). There are wasps in multitude of families and superfamilies, even some in the Apoidea superfamily, which contains the bees.

Wasps are typically predators. Even though most adult wasps eat nectar, they feed other insects to their children. It is rare for species of wasps to produce honey, but some do produce it to feed their larvae. Once again, as there are plenty of wasps, there are large differences in what wasps eat.

Wasps in general are extremely different and there are plenty of species of wasps. I'll focus on the most known types of wasps and sharing the most important facts about them.

This scientific picture was brought you from two photos from Pixabay.

Yellowjackets is one of the most known type of wasps, as yellowjackets are typically known as wasps. Yellowjackets are extremely common and known for their black-yellow stripes. Hornets are another type of very known wasps. They are too known for being social wasps and building nests, which they aggressively defend. Most common hornets are colored in black and yellow, but not always striped. Sizes and patterns vary in the species, but typically they are not hairy like bees and bumblebees. _{(Wasps in general can have far more different colors and sizes)}

The worst part though is that quite many types of hornets can be extremely aggressive when the old queen has died and the community has broken down. In this time, the hornets only look for food and warmth, attacking people in frenzy if they happen to get in the way.

The tip of "Don't annoy them and they'll leave you alone" won't work. Wasps in general are flying nightmares. I'm not going to write anything nice about wasps, as they aren't deserving it. Be friendly to bees and bumblebees though, but if you meet aggressive wasps, destroy them with fire. _{Don't necessarily actually do that, please}

Conclusion

• If it's hairy, it's nice
• Bees and bumblebees are nice
• Consider planting flowers which attracts pollinators to help bees and bumblebees survive
• Pollination is extremely important
• Hornets and yellowjackets are evil